‘Positive ID, Sarge,’ said Willems, who still managed to be stunningly attractive in the unflattering serge uniform of a WPC. She addressed both Sussock and King, who had turned in his chair to face her. ‘Mrs Wroe identified the deceased as that of her son.’
‘Upset?’
‘Not very.’ Elka Willems remained on the threshold of Sussock’s office. ‘She seemed more upset at the prospect of getting back too late to do the flowers at the Citadel.’
‘The Citadel?’
‘She’s in the Salvation Army. Just enlisted, I think, because she’s paying off her uniform at a fiver a week. But that’s by the way. The deceased is Eddie Wroe, late of Greenock.’
Richard King turned back to face Sussock and Elka Willems took the opportunity to wink at Sussock before closing the door behind her.
‘Well, so it’s over to you, Richard.’ Sussock stood and reached for his seat. ‘Be very careful how you go. Don’t cut yourself on anything in a druggie’s place of residence.’
Wroe and Dodemaide’s place of residence was at the bottom of Belmont Street, Kelvinbridge, G12. Belmont Street thrust at ninety degrees from the traffic lights and trendy shops and pubs and night spots on Great Western Road, rising up to the bridge over the Kelvin where a few weeks previously two thugs had suspended a young man over the parapet, threatening to drop him sixty feet into the freezing waters below because he was unable to give them the cigarettes they demanded. The houses at the bottom of Belmont Street were solid sandstone terraced property, each on three levels, fabulous homes in their heyday, but now in a state of disrepair, some empty, shored up with timbers, others boarded up with corrugated iron which was easily torn down by the city’s down-and-outs, ready and convenient for all amenities: ‘skippering’ premises. On one property, the entire rear wall had recently fallen, hingeing backwards from the ground like a solid expanse of brick, crashing down with some good fortune, on to empty waste ground. Its collapse exposed rough areas in the ground floor and the first and second floors, odd sticks of furniture, mattresses on the floor, wallpaper peeling from the walls. The City wanted to demolish the houses and renovate the area for redevelopment; pressure groups wanted the houses themselves to be renovated, seeing them as part of the city’s rich Victorian architectural heritage.
It was dark and drizzling steadily when King turned his car right, off Great Western Road and into Belmont Street, followed by a van containing two uniformed officers. He pulled to a halt outside the address given on Eddie Wroe’s social security card, the same address given on the list of p.c.‘s held by SCRO on both the deceased and Shane Dodemaide. King looked at the house. Grey paint faded over the chipped stonework. The building was mostly in darkness. A light shone from an upper window. He checked his watch: 23.40.
It had been a routine back shift, warrants served, paperwork done, details of thefts taken, suspicious persons being reported by members of the public and responded to with some success: a car with three youths sitting outside a house known to be empty and reported by a sharp-eyed member of the public turned out to be three youths wanted in connection with housebreaking offences. A visit to their homes revealed their bedrooms to be Aladdin’s caves of identifiable stolen goods, watches, clocks, video recorders, credit cards, fur coats and sheepskin jackets. That, King had found, was often the way of it, one phone call can crack a case, as in this instance; an entire string of housebreakings had been wrapped up by a single phone call. Three ashen-faced youths of good and somewhat indulged middle-class homes sat in the detention rooms. They had lawyers provided by devastated parents, but the case against each was concrete and they were looking at two to three years’ youth custody, during which time they would be banged up for twenty-three hours a day with some of the toughest, hardest and most twisted neds in Scotland.
Shane Dodemaide, King reasoned, had better be left until later in the shift. The communication network among the drug-abusers had always astounded King with its speed and efficiency and clarity of transmission of information. If he called too early and Dodemaide wasn’t in, then wherever he was, he’d hear within thirty minutes that the law was hunting him and he’d go to ground. Unless, King reasoned, unless he heard that the law was on his trail, then he wouldn’t be going anywhere; best to leave it, he thought, best to leave it until there’s half a chance of catching him at home. Twenty minutes to midnight seemed to him to be as good a time as any.
King got out of the car and put his collar up against the rain. He walked up to the front door of the house and, as he approached the building, smelled the musty smell of damp emanating from the sandstone. The two constables, in capes, followed him. He walked up the slippery uneven flagstones to the front door and pressed the doorbell. Not a sound. He rapped on the door twice and heard the sound echoing inside the building.
He stood in the rain and looked at the constables. He raised his eyebrows, but they remained stone-faced. Eventually, a thin, squeaky, female voice called from within, ‘Who is it?’
King didn’t reply. Again the voice said, ‘Who is it?’
King knocked on the door twice.
Silence from within the building.
A car passed behind them, going up Belmont Street, its tyres hissing on the wet surface of the road.
Again the voice said, ‘Who is it?’ The voice was closer than before, maybe one flight up. King expected one of the windows above them to slide open and a head peer out, but the occupants of the house did not take that precaution, or couldn’t—most likely the window frames had warped and rotted, jamming them shut.
‘Who is it?’ This time she was just behind the door.
‘Police,’ said King.
‘Polis! Polis!’ The woman screamed and seemed to fly into a panic.
King stepped aside. ‘Punt it in.’
The two officers put their shoulders to the door. It gave easily and the cops entered the building in time to see a skinny girl in blue jeans leaping up the stairs two at a time, still shouting, ‘Polis! Polis!’ One of the uniformed officers ran after her and caught her easily. In the house doors were slammed shut, there was the sound of furniture being dragged across the floors and placed against the doors. Someone switched the hall light off.
King groped for a switch and turned it back on. It stayed on.
A male voice yelled, ‘Drug Squad. It’s a bust!’ Upstairs a window smashed.
King climbed the stairs. On the first floor landing one officer held the skinny girl in blue jeans. She was a waif, pale and drawn. She looked to be about thirteen.
‘How old are you?’ he asked as he approached the girl.
‘Seventeen.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Sadie Kelly.’ She had a soft Irish accent.
‘And you’re seventeen.’
‘Aye.’
‘Well, you don’t look it, Sadie Kelly, so we’ll take you in until we can check it out.’
The girl struggled violently.
‘We’re looking for Shane Dodemaide,’ said King. Sadie Kelly glared at him.
‘Look, Sadie Kelly,’ King said softly, ‘it works like this. If you are seventeen and there’s no outstanding warrants out on you, then you can leave the police station. We are not DS, so we’re not going to search your room. But if you don’t help us, we’ll prefer charges like resisting arrest, obstructing the police, wasting police time and anything else that we can think of And if we do that, we’ll detain you in custody until your trial, because this is a squat. We can’t and won’t recognize it as an address. So—where is Shane Dodemaide?’
‘That room there.’ She indicated the door immediately on King’s right.
‘Couldn’t be more convenient,’ said King.
He knocked on the door. From within came the sound of someone murmuring. King was amused that someone could sleep through the recent commotion, even when there were voices raised outside his very door.
‘Who is it?’ said a sleepy voice.
‘Shane Dodemaide?’
‘Aye.’
‘Police. Open up.’
The door clicked open. A pale youth in blue jeans stood blinking in the doorway and King wondered if all the pale and emaciated waifs in the city lived in this house.
Dodemaide had an odd face and King reproached himself for being cynical, trying as he was to live up to the highminded ideals of his wonderful Quaker wife. None the less, he couldn’t help but be struck by Dodemaide’s features. The boy had a sharply receding forehead which in profile would have run in a continuous line to a pointed nose. He had a small mouth, below which was a receding, barely perceptible chin. He had loud, centrally parted ginger hair and a ginger moustache which extended widely at either side of his face. To King he looked not unlike a caricature of a rat.
‘Am I under arrest again?’ he said sleepily.
‘Yes.’
‘I choose to remain silent. What are you going to pin on me this time—breach of the peace? Anything to keep your arrest rate up, I suppose. So glad that I can be of use.’
‘We’re not going to pin anything on you, Shane. You are very neatly wrapped up.’
‘For what?’
‘Murder. Get dressed, please, you’re coming down town with us.’
‘Rather wished that you’d told us, Jim,’ said the voice on the other end of the line. ‘We’ve been watching that house for some time.’
‘Constantly?’
‘No. On and off—otherwise we would have seen you go in. Let’s say we’ve been keeping a wee eye on the building and its occupants.’
‘I really don’t think that we did any damage,’ said King. ‘They thought that we were Drug Squad, but we disabused them of that notion.’
‘You didn’t search, then?’
‘No.’ King leaned forward and rested his elbows on his desk as he tended to do when undertaking a difficult telephone conversation. His courtesy call to the Drug Squad to inform them of the panic that he had caused at the given address had not met with the thanks that he had anticipated. ‘No,’ he repeated, ‘we had no grounds for a search warrant.’
‘So who did you lift?’
‘Shane Dodemaide.’
‘Ratty?’
‘Is that his nickname?’
‘It’s our name for him. Don’t tell him or you’ll hurt his feelings. We’ve given nicknames to half a dozen or so in that house for rapid ID among ourselves, so that we know who we are talking about.’
‘I see. We also pulled an Irish girl, Sadie Kelly.’
‘Yes. We know her. She’s got previous for possession.’
‘We’re checking her out. She only looks to be about thirteen.’
‘She’s actually seventeen,’ said the sergeant of the Drug Squad. ‘She won’t carry her birth certificate because she gets pulled on suspicion of being a runaway and if she gets kept in a police station for long enough, she gets fed a free meal. She keeps herself going that way. I also think she enjoys the game. Anyway, you just went in and out.’
‘Yes.’
‘Saw no one except the two that you buckled?’
‘No one.’
‘Didn’t go into any of the rooms?’
‘Only Shane Dodemaide’s dive and even then just briefly. Nothing in it; mattress on bare floorboards, a few sheets, a blanket, smell of damp.’
‘Was he alone in the room?’
‘Yes. Should he not have been?’
‘Thought he might have been with his moll—tall, dark-haired girl.’
‘No. No, he was alone.’
‘Fair enough. Can I ask why you lifted him?’
‘Wanted in connection with the murder of Eddie Wroe.’
‘Eddie…’ The sergeant of the Drug Squad gasped down the telephone. ‘See, those neds—they’re like a tank full of Siamese fighting fish. If they’re not mugging pensioners, they’re mugging each other. Do you know what happened?’
‘No. We found Eddie Wroe’s body early this morning—’ King glanced at his watch: 0023—‘that is to say, early yesterday, Sunday, morning, in an alley in the town. Multiple stab wounds, knife beside the body. Knife fitted the wounds. Eddie Wroe’s blood on the knife—well, the same blood group anyway, and lo and behold, whose dabs do we find on the weapon?’
‘Shane Dodemaide’s?’
‘The one and the same. Both known to each other, both live in the same squat, both have p.c.‘s and Dodemaide in particular has p.c.‘s for violence.’
‘Pretty well open and shut.’
‘Looks that way.’
‘Still, it’s not Dodemaide’s style, if I know Dodemaide. He’ll give someone a kicking but I’ve never known him use a weapon.’
‘He’s only twenty-one. He’s just starting out and it was a particularly frenzied attack, by all accounts. Wroe probably called him “Ratty”.’
‘So what is Dodemaide saying about it?’
‘Not a lot.’ King relaxed a little, the angry edge had left the voice of the sergeant of the Drug Squad as it had become clear that little or no damage had been done by the CID. ‘He seems shaken, upset, reckons that he and the deceased were mates, reckons he was in bed from eleven p.m. Saturday night until midday Sunday.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes. He can’t offer an alibi or a witness, and as his only mates all appear to live in that house, then any witness that he might be able to come up with would be of limited credibility. Says he stays in bed late because he gets hungry if he gets up and he can’t afford to eat as much as he would like to.’
‘I can believe that. All his cash goes on yellow powder that he punctures into his veins. He’ll start going into cold turkey in a few hours’ time. Won’t get any sense out of him then.’
‘I’ll go and have another chat with him. Can I ask the nature of the Drug Squad’s interest in the house?’
‘Nothing that we can put our finger on; we jut know the building as a nest of thieves and vipers, all of whom have an unhealthy interest in narcotics. Most are low-lifers, no serious pushers with villas in Spain that we can identify. Most are petty neds and no-hopers from the beginning; one or two are university dropouts like “the Princess”.’
‘Who is she?’
‘Tall raven-haired beauty of about nineteen summers. She who I would have been expecting, or half-expecting, to share a bed with Dodemaide. She appeared on the scene a few weeks ago, just inside the New Year, and hasn’t been seen for a week almost. Nothing to be alarmed about. She became Dodemaide’s moll, but has probably dropped back into the University, if she has any sense. We called her the Princess for ready identification. Never got to know her name. All that live in house claim state benefit and spend the night hustling, mugging people, the boys screw cars or turn people’s windows, the girls work the street.’
‘Some life,’ said King.
Elka Willems glanced sideways at the luminous dial of the alarm clock on her bedside cabinet: 01.40. She said, ‘Monday, bloody Monday.’ She had to report for duty in less than five hours. Sleep evaded her and the more she tried to get to sleep, the more awake she seemed.
Beside her under the duvet Ray Sussock grunted something unintelligible. He was sleepy, on the verge of sleep itself The wine had made him sleepy, Sunday dinner, a traditional roast, eaten in the evening, assisted by wine. He had handed over to King, leaving the station only when the deceased had been positively identified, and had driven home. Some home, a temporary bedsit in a large house in the West End of Glasgow. He had washed, grabbed a change of clothes, and had then driven over to Langside. He parked his car right at the entrance to the close and went up the stair. The door with the ‘Willems’ nameplate in gold on a fancy tartan background was two up right. He pressed the bell. She opened the door and smiled at him. Gone was the severe serge uniform and blonde hair tight in a bun. Now she was in tight, figure-hugging jeans and a sweater and her hair fell about her shoulders, a twenty-seven-year-old blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic goddess. Dutch on her father’s side. She reached forward and hooked a slender fin
ger under the knot of Sussock’s tie, tugged him over the threshold and hipped the door shut behind him.
‘In you come, old Sussock,’ she said.
Later, mid-evening, after the meal, they lay side by side and listened to a woman in high heels click-click beneath their window while upstairs the heavily built middle-aged woman stamped crossly across her floor, their ceiling.
‘Heaven only knows what the neighbours think,’ she had said, running her slender fingers down his spine, ‘we did make a bit of a noise.’
‘That’s me,’ he had murmured into the pillow, ‘sixty years old and still a sexual athlete.’
‘It’s a bit hypocritical,’ she giggled, lying back and looking at the ceiling. ‘I mean, we’re cops—how can we expect people to come quietly if we can’t do it ourselves?’
Then she had slumbered. Later, she had awakened. Beside her old Sussock, who had earlier crossed her room looking, she thought, like a potato on stilts, was almost asleep. She was awake.
She tried to grab two hours before the alarm jangled her into resentful activity. She couldn’t and lay there feeling cheated of something.
He actually did it. King felt his lips begin to twitch into an unkind grin, almost laughing at a joke in poor taste, but he actually did it. Ratty put the backs of both hands up to his nose and sniffed and blew, as if preening whiskers. King had sat opposite Dodemaide, then stood and addressed him from the corner of the interview room and watched as he sniffed and blew with both hands reversed against his nose.
‘Listen, Shane.’ King sat again and looked into Dodemaide’s frightened eyes. ‘You are a young guy, but you’ve got a lot of previous. That means that you know the score, so you know fine well that when your hide is nailed to the wall, as your hide is right now, then you begin to run out of options. Basically, you’ve got two…’
‘I work for myself or I work against myself Dodemaide had a low-pitched, hard-edged voice, the voice of someone who felt that life had done him a great injustice. King thought it strange that a deep voice should belong to one so tiny. ‘I know these words by heart. I say them in my sleep. Like you said, I’ve been this way before.’
And Did Murder Him Page 5